“They buried him with his sword?”
“Do you not think it fitting?”
“Of course. And his pistol? Was he buried wearing that?”
He turned to gaze on my mask and then at my eyes. Even as his vision was concentrated upon me, he seemed to me, as always, to be staring in more than out. “He wears only the sword. The coroner’s jury have the pistol still.” He waited for me to speak, but I did not. “You should have seen it. And you would have, leastwise, been invited to, on the strength of our deep acquaintanceship. It was only family there, you see. They carried him from the hearse to the cemetery ground. I must report myself composed. I think that Lizzie and I were both composed. Although when he was lowered in, tucked away for the last time in his boy’s life, and the sound issued of earth as it fell upon the coffin, and Stanwix shuddered as if struck by lightning or some other force invisible, I wished to gnash and wail at the skies.”
“Is that where you would look?”
“For what?”
“For God.”
“I look nowhere for God. If he be manifested, I will see. If he be considered, it will be within my speculations.” He nibbled at the core of the apple and tossed it to the dog, who ran from it, then ran back toward it, sniffed it cautiously, and chewed it down. “I regard my surviving son, a stripling boy, who cannot, often, hear. So perhaps I will learn to listen for God. Perhaps if I hear, Stanny will as well. Will we walk, then?” His eyes were wet, and he turned, so that I saw his back as we left the park; he was in hiding, behind himself.
I said, as we were closer to his striking off for the district office on the North River, and as I would turn toward the Exchange and, nearby, the office of Lapham Dumont, “We must protect the children, mustn’t we?”
He stopped his long stride and lifted his head. “From what?”
“From the loss of their youth. From, in a case I know, actual slavery.”
“To whom?”
“Agriculturists.”
“Where?”
“South. Deep South.”
“They are Negro youth?”
“Near infants, some of them.”
“Whom we might rescue?”
I nodded.
“I would save a young life or two,” he said.
“We might speak of it again. But it might serve the children were we to do so in confidence. Entre-nous, as they say.”
“Confidence is my game,” he said. As he heard his own words, his face brightened, and he smiled. “Confidence,” he said.
“More on it later?” I said.
He clapped me across the shoulders with great power. “More,” he said, as if someone were pouring him a drink.
I walked the length of the narrow second-story office that was shared by traders like Dumont who also shared clerical assistance and runners. He was in a room made of wooden half-walls with frosted glass from, say, the waist to just above the head of the average man. One might have the illusion of privacy if not the privacy itself. He sat in a wooden chair at his desk and opposite was a client’s wooden chair. There were few books and no pictures. Light was from the gas fixtures suspended from the ceiling above each little office. He pushed his chair back as I stepped in and sat.
“No,” I said, as if to the dog in the park, “you stay.”
“It’s useless,” he whispered. “I’m in arrears. I haven’t the money.”
“Yet,” I said.
“Of course.” He had his gray handkerchief out, and he rubbed it on his face, then dried his hands in it. His red face shone, and his nose seemed lighted from within. “I will have your money. It’s an obligation,” he said. “Hate it though I might. The skins of bears. How could I?”
I permitted the mask to regard him. I compelled him, with its unreadable stare, I hammered him down until he was impaled in his seat. I waited seconds more. “The question,” I said in a low, level voice, “is how will you?”
“Will what? That is: will I what? Do what?”
“Assist me.”
“In what endeavor, sir?”
“In none about which you need to know or, indeed, will know. I require from you a manifest, an order for carting, and a receipt. Don’t trouble yourself in dating the documents, since I will act, in this instance, as your clerk.”
“Manifest of what? For what? Who to? Why?”
“The cargo will consist of whatever might come in tun or half-tun barrels.”
He lifted his eyes to stare at the mask. “And what will you be placing in the barrels?”
“There might be nothing in them. There will, in all probability, be no barrels. That is not your concern. Yours is to produce the papers I require, signed by yourself.”
“What protects me, Bartholomew?”
“I’ll protect you, Dumont. Just as I have done.”
“From who did you ever protect me?”
“William Bartholomew. He is an acid-etched man of measureless cruelty. A welsher needs protecting from a man like that. He would as soon tear your kidneys out and grill them with bacon for his dinner. I have it on authority he has forborne from devouring whatever’s edible in you only because he wants you alive to pay your obligation to him. I believe this. Do you believe this?”
He nodded his long neck, his bony head. “A good deal of it I do. I do.”
“Good. You sound married to my proposal,” I said.
He nodded again, this time silently, as he rubbed at his face with his knuckly, long fingers.
“The paperwork,” I said.
“Agreed. Do I need to shake your hand?”
I smiled. He could not see me. I stood and said, “Within the week, then?”
“Today,” he said. “Tomorrow. As you wish.”
“The money shortly thereafter?”
“That’s as I can.”
“It’s as I say.”
“The money thereafter. Rest assured.”
“Yes, Lapham.”
He wiped at his face with his handkerchief, and I left before he blew his nose.
Someone was hurting a child, though it might have been a woman I heard — perhaps a small woman, I thought. Over the noises of the city’s dawn, as wagons slowly rolled on wheels that splintered upon the cobbles under the burden of hides, beef halves, dead poultry buried in ice, fresh flowers for the breakfast tables of the wealthy, or the furniture from households in arrears, I heard the steady cry of someone small, with a high voice, being hurt. It was remarkably regular, and soon enough it became one of the many sounds — you could even hear the doves coo, and the scolding by dirty sparrows — that constituted the calling awake of those who knew how to sleep.
Oh and Oh and Oh.
No, I thought: a child. I could not discern whether it was a response to hard blows, or the prodding of some instrument — fire poker, knife, the buckle of a belt — but it was regular and forceful, for the sounds were clearly part of an expulsion of breath, a response to a shock.
An engine at the New York and Harlem freight depot on White Street gave out a huffy demand, and I waited for the clash of metal that would signal cars being joined or pulled separate. I kept my eyes closed and kept my arms crossed as I lay on the cot. I thought of Malcolm lying in his uniform, sword at his side and apparently not armed for his journey with my revolver. It was an investment, but I would not mind its return. It had traveled with me, after all, up and down several states along our seaboard. It had saved my life and it had cost the lives of others. Seamen and their scrimshaw and clasp knives and trunks: shooters and their weapons.
The crying had grown ragged, the noises breaking into pieces as the one who uttered them also must break. Oh-uh, Oh-uh. One of the manufactories shrieked its whistle to signal in the workers for the day. Now it was Uh and then a silence, then Uh. Whoever administered the punishment was growing tired, I thought, and was pausing between blows. Of course, it was also possible the child was dying. As the small noise among a hundred loud ones became more and more noticeable for its absence, I thought: unconscious or dead. I thought: That’s a nice bit of luck for someone.